Up from the Bilges

When shrewd, burly Admiral Louis Denfeld was made Chief of Naval Operations (TIME, Nov. 24), the morale of Navy airmen, already low, sank into the bilges. Admiral Denfeld was a submarine and battleship man. The only thing he knew about air power, the airmen grumbled, was what he learned from watching Jap Kamikazes dive on his battleship division off Okinawa.

But even if Louis Denfeld was no airman, he knew where to find a good one to take over the Navy's No. 2 spot and the job of running the Navy's air arm. The trick was to break through Administration politics and force his man into the job. Last week he did it. The victory was won when the White House announced that Vice Admiral Arthur W. Radford, the Navy's most outspoken airman, would be Denfeld's vice chief of naval operations.

It had taken a lot of doing. Neither President Harry Truman nor the new Air Force had forgiven or forgotten Radford's angry last-ditch opposition to unification of the armed services, which he carried on even after the Navy had agreed to the merger. Defense Secretary Forrestal and Navy Secretary Sullivan had trooped to the White House to plead Radford's case, Harry Truman had stubbornly put them off.

One day last week, Denfeld went to see his old & good friend Admiral William D. Leahy, the President's chief of staff. In his half-smothered bass voice, pounding his fist on the desk, mild Louis Denfeld told Leahy that he wanted Radford and nobody else.

Said Leahy: "Okay, Louie, if you think you can't get along without him, then I'm convinced you ought to have him. Go get" him." Denfeld did. When he left the President's study, he had Truman's approval of Radford in his pocket.

To disgruntled Navy airmen, whose mortal fear is that the independent Air Force will try to swallow the Navy's air arm, lean, 51-year-old Annapolisman Radford is the one admiral who is outspoken enough to hold the service together. Commander of the Second Task Force of the Atlantic Fleet, he has been a pilot since 1920, has served in nearly every branch of the Navy air arm from fighter squadrons to command of a carrier task group in the Pacific. He has also done his desk time in Washington, got his battle command because of his decisive slicing of red tape to set up the Navy's best air training program early in the war.

As Submariner Denfeld's chief executive, Airman Radford will run the Navy's day-to-day operations while Denfeld fights its battles with Congress, the Budget Bureau and the White House. On second look, even the Navy's "Young Turks" conceded that it would be hard to find a better team.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.